André Liebich
Now that “de-confinement” is taking place throughout most of Europe we can draw conclusions. Clearly, people are more attached to their security than to their freedoms. Invasive tracing applications, regardless of the assurances given by their promoters, are the most recent demonstration of this fact.
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Emel Uzun Avci
For 30 years or more the Kurdish question has been the most urgent agenda for Turkey. The Kurdish question is one of the hot topics of the academic area, studied within various disciplines through different perspectives. However; such a big issue that has such impact on both personal and collective encounters in daily life is not addressed at the ordinary and everyday level.
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David McCrone
Students of nationalism will have mixed views on the rise and rise of populism as an analytical concept. On the one hand, it seems very close to ‘nationalism’, and yet it rarely seems to connect with it explicitly. Take two seminal books on populism, Jan-Werner Muller’s What is Populism? (2016), and Cas Mudde and Cristobal Rovira Kaltwasser’s Populism: a very short introduction (2017). Both are short, indeed, almost identical in length – just over 100 pages.
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Ceren Şengül
In September 2013, the AKP (Justice and Development Party) government of Turkey abolished Andımız (literally translated as ‘Our Oath’). This was a policy that had been put in place by the Kemalist government during the early Republican period (1923-1938) of Turkey, and required all primary school students to gather at schoolyard every morning to recite a speech expressing dedication to the Kemalist principles of the state. Continue reading
Jonathan Hearn
Two things primed me to write a blog about Francis Fukuyama’s new book Identity: Contemporary Identity Politics and the Struggle for Recognition. First, last week I gave a lecture to students on our MSc in Nationalism Studies on the key theoretical ideas of Liah Greenfeld. I was explaining to them the central role of the expansion of ‘dignity’, from a preserve of aristocratic elites, to a general property of the members of the nation. Continue reading
Taylor McConnell
Yugoslavia died in 1991. Or 1992. Or 1995, 1999, 2003, or maybe even 2018, pending the results of the name dispute between Macedonia and Greece. In Croatia, however, Yugoslavia, for all intents and purposes, may as well have never existed, or so many in power hope. The Croatian right has pushed in recent years for a narrative of false equivalence between Yugoslav “totalitarianism” under Josip Broz Tito and fascism, an experience and critical point of memory handled all too haphazardly. Continue reading
The 29th Annual Conference of the Association for the Study of Ethnicity and Nationalism (ASEN) will take place 24-25 April 2019. This year’s theme will be Nationalism and Self-Determination. For the first time the Annual Conference will take place in Edinburgh, not at the LSE, and is organised in cooperation with ASEN Edinburgh. The Ernest Gellner Lecture will take place 23 April 2019. Co-Chair applications will be accepted until 12 October 2018. Please, submit your abstract by 15 November 2018. Continue reading